If you are watching the second series of the Danish political drama Borgen, don't tell me what happens. I am just getting into the first series, having got the box set for Christmas. What I didn't expect was to find a good running gag about art in it.

Denmark has a new prime minister, the progressive Birgitte Nyborg, a modern woman with modern attitudes. One change she wants to make immediately: her predecessor had stuffy old oil paintings from Denmark's National Gallery lining the walls of his office. Nyborg asks for something more "modern".

I don't know where her aesthetic quest ends, but so far it has proved surprisingly difficult to change the art in her office. The National Gallery even played a surreal joke by sending her parodically bad graffiti-style paintings. In the political context of Borgen, this is an image of how hard it is to change anything. Yet it is also an astute observation about art.

In its third series, when it was mocking the last days of New Labour, The Thick of It satirised a similar kind of unthinking art choice. Ministerial offices were hung with vacant but undeniably contemporary art. Progressives want "progressive" art; conservatives want "conservative" art.

It is very much a 21st-century fixation. When I was a politicised student in the 1980s, nobody made this knee-jerk assumption about culture. We went from picket lines and protests to see the latest Merchant Ivory film. Why, today, do people feel obliged to make cultural choices that symbolise a political and social stance?

Over on the Telegraph's site, the writer Harry Mount is praising PG Wodehouse. Naturally – the Telegraph would be lapping up the inconceivably posh world of Jeeves and Wooster, wouldn't it?

But I felt bad. I had been meaning to praise Wodehouse here, and I held back. It would look silly, writing about his well-heeled world of Old Etonians and their butlers when I am meant to be covering the latest happenings at the ICA.

Yet, back when I was at a Welsh comprehensive school and had barely even been to England, let alone met any posh people, I used to laugh like a drain at the Jeeves stories. They were just so hilariously written.

Recently I was back home in north Wales, for a sad reason. After days at my father's deathbed, I looked around the house for something to read. I found a Wodehouse book. The voice of Bertie Wooster was a medicine of joy. The pure, comic world of Wodehouse fortified me.

That taught me something about art – and class, and Britain. You cannot divide art into the us and them. If you deny yourself the pleasure of the posh, you are just cutting off your access to art that you might really, deeply need. I needed Wodehouse – and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists would not have done instead.